Our gregarious building manager, Dave Edwards, “Big D,” was ribbing me the other day for not riding my bike to work. I don’t remember whether it was that day or the next day that the two of us, being athletically dressed and all, worked to rescue cars from the merciless conditions around the building. I did a couple nice face plants in the carbon-stained snow as the suddenly freed cars lurched backwards. That’ll wake you up. Anyway, the point is, it’s not biking weather. And Big D knows this, but he’s just trying to get my goat.
Without the bike, I’ve been car-pooling with my wife who a) is gracious, b) has a car with tire chains, and c) works not far from here.
This morning she dropped me off, but the building was locked. I couldn’t get in and when I sought an explanation from the friendly young man shoveling the walk, he explained that the building was on vacation. I’d heard that expression before, that “the building will be on vacation.” I feel better about my work ethic knowing that I showed up and tried to get in on a day when the building was on vacation. Of course, I would have known this had I read my emails more carefully but, hey, I get distracted. So worried am I about the fate of the Republic, the planet, and the law, that I sometimes overlook the postings about the daily itinerary. It’s a problem I’ve battled since junior high school.
There are a couple other things I need to own up to. There’s another way in the
building, but I’ve forgotten the security code. Also, I don’t own a cell phone, and I don’t want to own a cell phone, a viewpoint that strikes some as completely unreasonable.
Well, what to do? The main reason I even go to the office is to interrupt people who work at the Center so they can tell me where to go. I was tempted to spend the rest of the morning at the The Rocket across the street drinking coffee but that just seemed so bohemian. Plus, if someone were to recognize me and ask what I was doing, I would have to tell them that I got locked out from work because I didn’t read the email about the building being on vacation. I would tell the truth because I’m not a terribly well-organized person which is what I think you need to be if you’re going to be a successful liar, even if you only lie about little things, like why you suddenly decided to indulge in a 90-minute coffee break. 
So I decided to catch the bus home. But when I consulted the bus schedule in my backpack I discovered that the bus for my route–which is sparse in terms of riders and thus served by a vehicle the size of a rental car shuttle–wouldn’t come until afternoon. So my choices were to do public opinion polling at the STA plaza, drop in at the Spokesman-Review and explain that I’d been invited to be on their radio show, or take the long way home, on foot, and see what Browne’s Addition looks like with all this beautiful, sticky snow clinging to every branch.
I used to live in Browne’s Addition and so I know some of the shortcuts. I know where the trail starts, for example, that winds down to the bottom of the gorge on the west side. And so I started down the trail and, almost immediately, heard a dog barking angrily. It’s clear he’d been using the trail (and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that picture) but it seemed unreasonable to me that he would be asserting
ownership of the trail, which is what he was doing. He was a pretty big dog, orangish, with a haircut that made him look like an angry fascist. So I tried to befriend him, and he would have none of that. So I just asked him, straight on, why on such a beautiful day would he want to bite me rather than share the trail? And that seemed to shame him and he walked off. And that’s how I got this nice picture of the Marne Bridge, looking west toward the Spokane River. In Browne’s Addition I also walked past a man, about my age, who was using a downhill ski to try to clear snow from his parking space on the street. I’d never seen that before. But at least he didn’t try to bite me.
As for the picture of the half-frozen creek looking straight down from the high bridge, I can’t tell whether the silhouette more resembles Queen Elizabeth or ET, but I’ll leave it to your imagination. The picture with the cat tails is at a place the kids and I long ago dubbed the secret pond and today I found the path to it by following deer tracks in the snow.
–Tim Connor
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